Working Girls

Not to be confused with Lizzie Borden’s 1987 feature about New York prostitutes, although Dorothy Arzner’s brazen 1931 drama about two small-town sisters (Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood) looking for jobs and men in the big city sometimes makes a few parallel feminist observations. The dumbness of Hall’s character gets laid on with a trowel at times (Aw, you don’t have to speak so sarcasmly, she says at one point), and the movie never seems to make up its mind whether the European intellectual (Paul Lukas) who hires her as a secretary is predatory or a patsy. But the Depression atmosphere is indelible. With Charles Buddy Rogers. 77 min. (JR)

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